Resleeved: On the Occasion of Eclipse Phase 2E's release

Eclipse Phase, 1E, from Posthuman Studios.

This piece is going up late, as I injured my hand last night (ironic, I know.) This past summer, Edgar and I played in an Eclipse Phase game run by a friend who was in the process of moving out of the country. We had a great deal of fun, and in the last session, just as our characters were about to confront an enemy that we would be unable to defeat, and the game master stopped the game.

“Let’s step outside for a cigarette,” he said. “I’d rather hang out with you guys than run this encounter.”

And we stepped out onto his porch and had a bullshit session, looking up at the moon.

A friend recently told me, after that game master gave us the book, that the second edition is being released, and I took a look at the PDF.

I have thoughts.

First and foremost, I have a lot of respect for the creative team: Eclipse Phase could easily have turned into a heartbreaker game — one of those really convoluted projects that someone dreams about making, and pours all of their effort into making, and it just keeps creeping, reaching further and further until it can’t possibly come to fruition.

A comparison of two games released in the late Aughts

When I first became aware of Eclipse Phase, I was obsessed with another game I’ve since stepped back from — a publication called CthulhuTech, which merged elements of many late 80s/90s anime series (including Evangelion, which I’ve been a fan of for a very long time,) with the mythology of horror luminary and famous racist H.P. Lovecraft (the, uh, the racism wasn’t exactly a selling point,) —and so the two have long been entangled in my mind.

CthulhuTech, 1e, from Wildfire, LLC.

Beyond simply being released around the same time, both are science-fiction horror settings. CthulhuTech is more Lovecraft (obviously,) with some Event Horizon added in, while Eclipse Phase is more Roadside Picnic and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. So there is a tonal similarity, but there’s also some key differences.

Both are purportedly horror, yes, but horror requires subtlety. The mixture works better with Eclipse Phase because CthulhuTech draws on the giant robot genre of anime, which is not particularly known for its subtlety. The unstable marriage worked for a while and then the publishers, Wildfire, released a pair of books, one after the other, entitled Damnation View and Unveiled Threats, which laid bare the cavalier attitude that the development team had toward depictions of sexual violence. It is possible, in the right hands, for this subject matter to work in horror — I’m a big fan of Angela Carter — but there was zero subtlety to the handling of the subject matter here.

Eclipse Phase never did that. As much as we joked at the table about it being the “result of some silicon valley tech bros playing Call of Cthulhu,” there was actually very little of the bro-ish cavalier attitude that had put such a bad taste in my mouth around CthulhuTech. I had philosophical differences with Eclipse Phase, but I didn’t feel like the writers were unsympathetic, as I did with WildFire’s creative team.

And now both games are releasing second editions — but while Posthuman Studios can focus on how they’re streamlining the system, removing a faction that had grown somewhat fascistic in its depiction as a player option, and adding more fine-grained detail, WildFire has to advertise what’s being removed from their game.

A Brief Aside

I’ve internalized a lot of terminology to describe these games because I read a lot and play a few of them; there’s a certain utility to being able to say that one game is “trad” and one is “indie” or to describe something as having a lot of “crunch” — both of the games that I’ve mentioned above are heavily on the trad (“traditional”) end of the spectrum, which means that there are complex trees of options to keep track of, long lists of skills, and that there is occasionally an antagonistic role between the players and the game master, who also acts as something of a referee.

Indie games, on the other hand tend to have briefer lists of options, broader definitions, and a more narrative focus than anything else. As I’ve gotten older and had jobs that required I keep track of more things, I’ve grown to greatly appreciate indie games and their relative simplicity.

In the next section, I’m going to talk pretty glowingly about the new edition of Eclipse Phase. A major part of this is the fact that it is borrowing more elements from indie games and incorporating them into a trad framework. It is my belief that this is ultimately a good trend.

The Changes

Eclipse Phase, 2e, from Posthuman Studios.

This is going to be inside baseball for a bit: Eclipse Phase uses a percentile role-under system, meaning that players roll two ten-sided dice, the results on one indicate the tens digit, and the results on the others are the ones digit. You want to roll beneath what you put on your character sheet. That has remained.

What has changed is that the skill list, while still extensive, has been truncated, as have the sheer number of modifiers that can be applied. In addition, the mind/body division that makes up one of the central conceits of the game (that the “ego” or mind of a character can be transferred from body to body, and that this is considered one of the most efficient ways to travel) has been greatly improved and made much easier. Instead of providing flat numerical bonuses and penalties, different bodies now possess “pools” of spendable currencies that can be spent in predefined ways for particular benefits.

Or, I should say, there are three pools that are associated with the body (or “morph” — these pools are Insight, Moxie, and Vigor), and one with the ego, called “Flex”. I love the new Flex mechanics — it doesn’t simply work as a way to boost certain skills or flip the ones and tens place of your roll. Flex also allows players to seize limited narrative control: players can now introduce a character or object, as well as defining environmental factors and allows players to establish relations between Player Characters and Non-Player Characters.

The tech bros discovered the FATE system, it seemed. Or maybe one of the Apocalypse World defined games. Either way, I love the injection of indie gaming elements into this.

Likewise, character creation, which took our group nearly five hours, despite us having multiple copies of the (Creative Commons released!) PDF available, has been greatly streamlined through the use of modular packages, which have the math of the point-buy system already factored in. I feel that this is a major step in the right direction.

Beyond the simple design, I have new respect for the dev team of this piece for several reasons, one being their continued use of Creative Commons licenses, and the other being two pieces of text they put on the second page of the first chapter.

First, from “A Note on Politics”:

Eclipse Phase delves into numerous political themes; in fact, we

start with the premise that everything is political. Like all authors,

we write from the perspective of our personal biases. Our specific

lens is radical, liberatory, inclusive, and antifascist. If you support

bigotry or authoritarianism in any form, Eclipse Phase is not the

game for you.

Second from “A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY, SEX, AND GENDER”

Sexual biology is ephemeral in Eclipse Phase. Sex is elective

and subject to change; almost everyone has the opportunity

to switch bodies. A character’s gender identity may

not always match their physical sexual characteristics (or

lack thereof). Gender identity itself is often fluid. To reflect

this, we apply the “singular they” rule, meaning that we

use “they” as the default pronoun for individuals. When

referring to specific characters with an established gender,

however, we use the pronoun appropriate to their current

gender identity, regardless of the sex of the morph they

happen to be in.

Likewise, they have given thought to how transgender and nonbinary identities would work in this setting, and labeled it all a non-issue for the major political blocs. Even the one bloc that is outright authoritarian is described as essentially not giving a shit about what a person does with their gender identity.

So, technoprogressive and liberatory. I perhaps misjudged them when our group was joking about them being “silicon valley tech bros” earlier this summer.

My Qualms

Netflix’s Altered Carbon is a major propagator of this idea.

Eclipse Phase has a tagline it reuses “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction approaches. Fight it.” While this has the rousing cadence of a call to arms, it’s one that leaves me cold until the very end (I’m generally anti-extinction. That may or may not be an unpopular views. I spend all of my time on the internet and can’t tell anymore.) The first couple of statements in particular strike me as somewhat dystopian: thinking of mind as software leads to the conclusion that you can reprogram yourself, but it’s a false equivalency.

I have mentioned in the past my skepticism related to mind-uploading in fiction and my dislike for how it has become a ubiquitous idea in science fiction with insufficient theoretical backing (yes, I’ve heard about the worm. No, it isn’t uploading.) I feel that Eclipse Phase is improving the system support for this, but it still needs a solution that doesn’t require a photocopier or scanner to use. I would also like more than a page or so on the philosophical and psychological implications. I feel like this requires a more complicated system than a simple dice roll.

Second, I feel that the confusion of data and knowledge implicit in the psychosurgery section — where skills can be bought and plugged into a character in the fiction of the game — is a similar permutation. There’s a difference between being familiar with a city and having a map of it: one is knowledge and one is data; it’s best to have both, but knowledge is more broadly applicable. I realize that this is necessary for the conceit of artificial intelligence to make sense, but it still hinges upon the (to me) nonsensical assertion that an animal (read: human) mind and a computer are at all similar.

Third, in a setting where there is the infrastructure for a post-scarcity society, it seems to me that a list of equipment doesn’t make sense — the game needs robust but comprehensible rules for creating objects from the ground up, because players are going to try to do that. Without attention paid to this, many Game Masters will be left in the lurch, saying “no” to many ideas, which is not a situation anyone wants to be in.

So, on the whole, while not perfect (after all, nothing is,) this game is a vast improvement over the prior version and I look forward to finding an opportunity to play it — but don’t expect anything I write and put my name on to reflect all of the ideas.

Except for those relating to gender identity and authoritarians — I’ll cosign those.

※

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